I love the guys and gals at Creative Commons. Developing flexible, inclusive copyright licenses for the digital age is unbelievably important. However, they made a huge oversight which makes the use of some of their licenses just as confusing as using traditional copyright licenses. It all boils down to ‘What does non-commercial mean?’

As many others have pointed out, is it OK to use creative commons licensed works which are tagged as non-commercial on a blog which is ad supported? Even this blog has a small number of ads, so am I breaking the law by using those works? It is generally accepted that it is OK, but that sort of argument will not hold up in court if someone was eager enough to pursue it. And what if I want to use a Creative Commons picture on my business website? I’d be walking into a legal mine field.

Fortunately, the Creative Commons people are listening and they’ve initiated a study into popular non-commercial usage so they can more clearly defined what is allowed and what isn’t. I hope they decide that selling copies of a CC work is not allowed, but just displaying it on your website is fine, otherwise it will go against the grain of what CC stands for, which is the more open sharing of creative works to allow others to benefit from them.

But this report is likely to take months. So where does this leave us? I’m really not sure, because until this report is completed I’ll be scared to use CC work, which really is a great shame.